Helping Families Understand Their LGBTQ Kids

Julie Tarney

Julie Tarney is an advocate for LGBTQIA youth, speaker and author. Her award-winning memoir, My Son Wears Heels: One Mom’s Journey from Clueless to Kickass (University of Wisconsin Press 2016) and blog of the same name are about her experiences raising a gender nonconforming child in the Midwest in the 1990s and what she learned from him along the way about gender identity, gender expression and self-acceptance. Julie is a board member for the It Gets Better Project, contributes to HuffPost Queer Voices and is an active member of PFLAG NYC’s Safe Schools program. Julie is also a member of the National Center for Transgender Equality’s Families for Trans Equality network, and was named a “Favorite Queer Hero of 2016” by HuffPost and one of BlogHer’s “Voices of the Year” in 2015. A longtime resident of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Julie now lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she can often be found cheering in the audience at her creative director and sometimes-drag-artist son Harry’s performances.